Monday, April 10, 2017

The Crime Numbers Report

Late on Friday, the German federal police released a report that concerned crime and statistics for 2016. It's NOT the kind of report that the Bundestag or Chancellor Merkel would be happy about.

For all of last year, there were roughly 295,000 crimes reported to local, state and federal cops....which go to an immigrant or 'visitor' in Germany. That's up from 205,000 in the year 2015.

Welt reported the bulk of this report. It's the kind of thing that will draw public forums over the next month, as cops, journalists, and politicians try to get a handle over the problem.

Oddly, one of the chief areas reported, was counterfeiting. When bogus bills were turned up or the cops were on some case....around 29-percent of the people arrested or detained....were immigrants or migrants. What the cops didn't say was who exactly. If you asked the federal cops....they might not have the database to divide these up. For example...if the federal cops busted six Serbian gangs up in 2016, and hustled off two-hundred members of their gang for detention, they'd be listed not as an immigrant, but likely as a 'visitor'.

Twenty-six percent of all robberies and brake-in's? Immigrant or visitor. That's a quarter of these situations that they can directly tie a guy of one particular origin to the crime.

Violent assault? Cops arrested or detained twenty-four percent, which were foreign or visitors. Course, you could comment that when some fight broke out in such-and-such visitor center with 12 drunk Somali guys fighting amongst themselves.....all twelve counted as an arrest statistic. I would take a humble guess that between local and state cops.....there's at least 1,500 individuals arrested in these immigration holding centers on assault or fighting charges for 2016. In this case, they were fighting their own crew, their own people, and mostly out of frustration or drunken behavior.

The federal cops also reported in this statistics report.....that 450 individuals were held or arrested because they attempted to kill someone. The someone is not defined in this report....it could be an associate at the refugee center, their wife, or the guy who insulted their wife at the center. It could be someone on the street who just said the wrong thing and got the guy all hyped up. Sixty-six of these individuals were noted as murder suspects. I should note the word suspect because the cops were kinda clear that case hadn't gone to court as of yet.

The landscape for crime in Germany is vast.

You have various criminal gangs which are active in various areas now. You have Lebanese, Serbian, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Italian, and Tunisian groups which have formed into gangs and get involved in different crime ventures. Some have visas.....some simply use the visitor status....and some just laugh at the rules.

To suggest that the Syrians or Iraqis who sought Germany as a safe-place because of ISIS are part of the big numbers game of crime.....probably won't work. You just don't see enough evidence of that.

Will someone try to force the cops to further identify the sub-divisions of the immigrants or visitors involved in these crimes? Maybe. But I suspect that the politicians would prefer less reporting and just avoid this topic entirely....just saying a criminal is a criminal rather than saying he might be a foreign criminal. The public won't be happy about that, but that's typically the way to handle this.

A crisis stage? No. The federal cops aren't suggesting that.

I think the angle taken by the federal cop report is this....they want to put prosecutors and the BamF group (the immigration controlling agency) at the tip of the problem. If they arrest a hundred immigrants on fairly serious crime (drug sales, assault, home theft, etc)....upon conviction, they want the folks removed from Germany. This long drawn out delay period? It's giving the guy an idea that he got away with his crime and that no one is serious about enforcing laws in Germany. The cops have a point in this.

The other side of this problem is that a fair number of people in Germany aren't in the immigration or asylum group. These are Romanians, Bulgarians, and Russians. In this case, something of a more creative nature will have to be done.

In an election year, the statistics shown don't really help the top two political parties or Merkel. It makes their political slant a bit more difficult. Both the SPD and CDU parties will have to react, and talk about an issue which they aren't happy to discuss. In the end.....there's likely to be more solutions put on the table to make voters happy.

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This essay log is written by an American who offers wit and sarcasm on Germany, Germans, Germanology, German political figures, German TV, German beer, German food, German humor (or lack of), German habits, German weirdness, German news, German autos, German brilliance, German stupidity, German customs, German Nazis, German history, and German stubbornness.

I was one of those Americans who did over twenty years of military time....married a German....and eventually returned as a retiree.

I'm one of the few who stood under the German umbrella.....paid German taxes for some years.....German social security.....and felt the various pains like Germans.

So, this is my all-purpose commentary essay, designed for Americans mostly (and those Germans who accidentally discover it). I tend to put German culture into the spotlight of sarcasm, wit and humor. I'm simply pointing out the richness and craziness of life in Germany, which even some Germans can't understand.

The amusing thing is that I'm merely repeating the exercise that Mark Twain performed in 1880, when he published "A Tramp Abroad". Various comments were dished out on the Germans....which apparently did not trigger any wars, chaos, climate change, or ill feelings.